Don't know if I phrased that quite right.

Anyway, here's the deal: I want to shut off a portion of the company's web site; just one directory, for a few hours. Let's call it website.net/foo. For those few hours, anyone who fires up a web browser and mosies on over to website.net/foo will be redirected to a page that says something like "We're sorry. This page is temporarily undergoing some maintenance. Please check back later." The goal is that people won't see the contents of the page getting all messed up and write in with complaints and such.

So how can I do this?

I assume you are using the apache webserver for this. Well you could look in the documentation under url redirection.

Probably something like this would work:

Redirect permanent /foo/ http://www.example.com/bar/

You could also re-name the index file to something else and you could stick up an "Under Construction" page as your index.html or .php or whatever your index file it is. Then when your are done, just delete ther under construction page and rename the updated index file back to index.html/php or whatever.

But it is iffy to update a live site, you could easily set up a testing server, sync all of the files and then make your updates on your testing server. When you are done, you can upload updated files to the live server.

Hope this helps.

Yep, development server is firmly in place. All the modifications will be happening there.

Actually, I did something similar to your suggestion, in that I moved the index file elsewhere, set up a symbolic link by the same name that points to the under construction page, and will move the index file back afterwards.

Thanks for the help.